Hi again! I am still here. In fact I am almost always here; here, being the couch. Here, being the internet – not quite so much. I am having to learn to do a lot of things via the iPhone. Yesterday I downloaded a feed reader thing and I can read blogs! At 3.45am! That’s what I want to be doing at that time of the night, for sure! Well, that and playing Words with Friends. Turns out everyone knows the tricksy Q and X words but me. Still! I am nourishing a human and increasing my vocabulary, all at the same time!

I am sorry but I have nothing but photos. And none even of the Frog; he has sadly taken a back seat in the photo department. Actually this is mainly because he has developed the same allergy type thing he had last summer, and is currently in the process of scratching himself bald, so he is rather less photogenic. Admittedly I took photos of him with a giant wound on his head, so maybe photogenicity is not my aim here (is that a word? spellcheck says that isn’t a word. It seems like a word to me) but never mind.

I stick my tongue out at you.

HAAAA I totally stuck my tongue out at you! Did you see?

Three! Ah ah ah! Three different spotty items! I love! To count! And buy dotted things!

Hi! I am still here. Mostly I am here one-handedly, as my lap area and one hand is often out of commission these days. Last night I messaged with my mum using the On Screen Keyboard, as I couldn’t reach the actual keyboard and only had use of the mouse. Did you know there was such a thing as an On Screen Keyboard? Neither did I, until necessity forced it upon me.

Anyway, how are you? We are fine. Thanks for all your lovely messages about AJ; she is great (especially at the moment, as she is sleeping and also wearing very cute clothes) and we will be keeping her. She arrived one day early which shocked the life out of me as I myself have never been early for anything. I often MEAN to be early, but it very rarely happens. Anyway, all went well, considering my birthplan was the very vague, “I want the baby to be healthy and I don’t want to die myself”; as far as I was concerned, all else could be negotiated. In the end I was extremely lucky (and have to thank my mother for very good genetics) as I had a 5-hour natural labour with no issues. I will politely avert my eyes as you gnash your teeth with disbelief; alternately I am more than happy to listen to your horror stories of 40-hour labours and emergency C-sections and hideous after-effects, all of which happened to friends of mine and all of which I was fully expecting to happen to me. So I am certainly not complaining, and nor am I claiming some sort of uber-birth powers as quite frankly the whole thing was totally out of my conscious control. And so here we are, with a three-week old currently napping on my chest. And already I feel guilty as I should Move The Child Off Me and have her sleep on her own; but eh. She’s three weeks old and I like having her here. Also did I mention the cute outfit?

As for her name, AJ is her first and middle initials. I am more than happy to let you know her name if you want to know it; I just won’t write it here for privacy reasons. Who knows what sort of sentient powers the internet (or, probably, The Internet) will have by the time she is computer literate (ie. probably in about 4 years). In fact The Internet could be reading this… er, reading itself… RIGHT NOW. (…and I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.) Regardless of her actual name, she mostly gets called The Squirrel around here anyway at the moment. Why? I don’t know. She just is. Same reason the dog is the Frog, I guess. And he has been fine with her, of course; he does try to lick her, and drink her bath water, but apart from that he mostly ignores her. I’m sure this will continue right up until the point where she starts eating proper food and learns to drop it for him, at which point he will follow her around as a devoted servant.

Some photos below, mostly of the non-humiliating kind. I am saving the humiliating kind for when she screams for three hours straight (again) and I crave revenge.

In her carseat/capsule thing after coming home from the hospital. It was crazy cold that day; and yet now a few weeks later we have just had a mini-heatwave. Melbourne: unpredictable weather doesn’t even BEGIN to cover it.

ALL THE HAIR. She has the hair of five babies. Seriously, it is still growing and it is now almost in her eyes. It doesn’t seem to be falling out yet, either. It makes it very hard to pick who she looks like, too; our current consensus is that she doesn’t look like either of us. Elfin changeling baby!